There must be something in this global warming thing for wanna-be politicos.

I attended a sustainable Scotland conference and discovered that it is the Scottish ambition to be a world leader in Green Technology, wind turbines, hydroelectric schemes etc. etc.

The ambition may not be quite so impossible in their minds because they have the example of the Aberdeen oil industry where there has necessarily been some innovation that makes them (made them) leaders in many aspects of the technology.

However, the reality is that North Sea exploration and production did necessitate some significant innovation that gave them something of world leader status.

But the world turns and moves on. Oil exploration is becoming even more demanding these days - but elsewhere on the globe and that leadership could prove transient as the North Sea is depleted and new and more difficult fields are developed and explored elsewhere and it is there that the new leadership and technological expertise will be developed. Indeed, it may even be that many of the skills desert Scotland for pastures new.

BUT I struggle to see how Scotland can bring anything as unique to the this new green energy market as the North Sea did to oil exploration and without that I suspect their wishes may fail to become reality.

Still, what have politicians to do with reality? (or visa versa).

Inevitably though, salvation and dreams of world leadership is inextricably intertwined with belief in AGW as without it Scotland's ambitions seem pretty pale.

They have another problem.

Yes, they and their audience were 100% gung-ho AGW believers, as is necessary, but the audience turned on the presenters and demanded what they meant by "sustainable growth".

They surprised the presenters too.

It would seem the audience didn't want to hear about sustainable growth, they didn't want any kind of growth. Green is fine, growth is not.

Now OK, a nice idea but in today's world reality when you stop growing you die. So now Scotland has to achieve world leadership in a contracting economy.

I think a bigger problem than the UK political consensus on whether AGW is going on is the possibility of further political consensuses about taking action to mitigate AGW. The main idea behind the climate Change Act introduced last year is to create such political consensuses.

There is one political consensus in the UK related to AGW that has been going on for 17 years and has started to become quite damaging, particularly in the past five years - the Dash for Gas consensus. British politicians are very keen on building gas-fired power stations, thanks to the switch from coal to gas the UK has been much more successful than most countries in meeting its Kyoto Protocol targets. But I don't think there's an equivalent of this Dash for Gas consensus in any other country - even Germany, which is a more Green-leaning country than the UK, intends to build 20 new coal-fired power stations and isn't going to cripple them with unrealistic carbon capture requirements.

The Conservatives seem almost certain to win the next general election but unfortunately they seem to be more tied to the Dash for Gas consensus than Labour are. Every now and again the Conservative Home blog tries to raise the issue of energy policy, an example being this article from last year: